Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday August 25, 2005 @11:06PM
from the written-by-men dept.

Jeremy Dean writes "In controversial research reported allover the place, Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University claims that, on average, men are more intelligent than women. Let battle commence!
As the research is not yet published there's nothing more to go on than the press reports. The co-author of the study, Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, is apologetic about the findings.
In the BBC News report he states that the paper will go on to argue that despite their disadvantage in IQ, there is evidence that women utilise their (lesser!) talents better than men. This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world."

You guys with mod points need to read the thread or article before using them... Half the comments here talk about how the author of this research is the same guy who concluded that white people were smarter than black people, and that lighter-colored black people were smarter than darker-colored black people.

So in conclusion -- according to him -- blacks and women are dumb. Caucasian males is the way to go.

Putting my Caucasian (are Finns caucasian?) intellect to work, I'd like to say who cares. Point of these studies is to boost the researchers ego. Variation of IQ within the population is so large that generalization is just inflammatory and serves no purpose.

So in conclusion -- according to him -- blacks and women are dumb. Caucasian males is the way to go.

No, he says no such thing. TFA refers to statistics. Differences in probablility and average. And the real significance is not in averages, but in the extremes.

Why do people get so upset at hearing claims that most geniuses are men, but will happily accept that most criminals are men? Did you know that the large majority of intellectually diabled people are male? Does that claim shock you too?

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether or not IQ tests are fair measures of "intelligence" (whatever that is), and consider the following question:

Hypothetically, in our enlightened modern climate of equality and fairness, even if were proven beyond doubt that (for example) men are more intelligent than women, would we accept it or (as most of the comments above, and on the BBC News feedback page) merely reject it out of hand?

Nobody would be up in arms if asian students were proven better at maths, or if gay people made better artists, or if women were proven more intelligent than men.

However, the first suggestion that the perceived majority group (straight white males) might be better than any minority, at anything, threatens us - just listen to the knee-jerk reaction of almost-unanimous disapproval.

The experimental procedure and results haven't been published yet - nobody even knows what the numbers are, how the trial was conducted or even what IQ test(s) were used, and yet here we have people who know nothing but a soundbite about the final conclusion of the study, already feeling justified in ripping it to shreds.

This has none of the justifications of considered intellectual doubt, and all of the hallmarks of instinctive emotional rejection.

Regarding the researcher's other work, does this necessarily prove he's a bigot? Could he (in fact) be merely discovering unexpected and therefore interesting statistical trends?

Racists claim that one race is unilaterally better than another, and this is (rightly) universally recognised as bad. However, wishful-thinking political correctness stipulates there's no difference between any groups of people, and this is clearly bullshit. Adults are stronger than kids. Men are generally stronger than women. Women are generally more empathic than men. And yes, black men on average have bigger (longer but thinner) penises than white men - look up the statistics.

These facts have been statistically proven time and time again, yet because they don't fit with our prevailing ideology we pretend they don't exist. This is no less intellectually dishonest than creationists who selectively ignore evidence that contradicts their position.

If we truly believing in science, mathematics and rationality means sometimes having to confront facts or possibilities that make us uncomfortable. Putting our hands over our ears and singing "Lalalalalala" is just as bad when we do it as when the ID or creationist crew do the same.

Assuming the study's accurate and valid, does this mean that women are stupid? No, it means that the average woman is (almost unmeasurably) less "intelligent" (whatever that means) than the average man. It means that men are more likely to be geniuses, not that women can't be.

Get down off your high-horses, reign in the emotion and behave in the same way we demand of the creationists - rational, sensible, and valuing Correct thoughts over Comfortable ones.

In many cases the issue of intelligence differences is probably the best way to describe men vs women. Women are different than men. Their sensory perception and attention focus is as a group very different from men. Visual Acuity falls as a no contest for women. Attention to tedious jobs falls as a no contest for women. Mathematical and Logical Thinking falls to men each of these differences have pretty wide differences. These are well documented.

As to the racial differences these too are unbelievably well documented. There are wide racial differences in intelligence and behavior. These include temper and acuity in understanding of various subjects. Contrary to the test bias claims these can be verified by some pretty basic tests that are done at birth and measure only function. Being and RN I have been trained in such evaluations. If you will note, I am treading lightly here because I am not telling who is who. The data has been there for a very long time that there are big differences. These are not some esoteric minor inflections. They range from edge perception detection of motion being present in nearly all persons of some races to not appearing in persons of other races until about age 1. These range from temper differences of response being quite passive to outright violent to the same stimuli. Yes the Irish are more tempermental than the English. (Hense the "Fighting Irish") Race you see is not just black and white.

To be more specific, asians who are yellow or light brown skinned (generally because there are some exception races there) are the highest scoring on tests of visual acuity and moderate temper. They also score highest on mathematical skills. European whites range from this level in the north Germanic areas down to average in central europe and much below average in the balkins. (Hense the English word Moron, coming from people from the Albaina region -- Look up city names for fun folks) These of course are group averages. Black races have considerable ranges as well. I suppose I would be called a racist if I note their levels and so to prevent the Moderator Idiot curve from hitting me I will let readers guess here.

Have fun people, there is a wide and quite well known set of variances in people by race and by sex. But to print it is to suffer unscientific assault and to be wiped out in Political Correctness. Mods... Get a Life and quit calling Troll the facts.

Why are emotions and logical understanding mutually incompatible? Show me the emotion that doesn't have a logical cause? If I'm angry with someone, I have a reason. If I'm afraid of something, then I have a reason. It is not always wise to act on these feelings straight away but that has little to do with whether I can comprehend them or not.

Girls tend to do better at school (statistically shown many times) than boys because girls tend to study more. But I make the case that study, both through learning from others and from excercising the memory and analytical capabilities of the brain, does increase that hard to define thing called intelligence.

But the most important thing to consider when reading this report is that there are over six billion people on this planet and that's a lot of people to generalize over. I'm not going to dispense with the scientific method just because of the subject matter, but if it were the case that men were more intelligent than women on average, then that statistical difference would have to be enormous to justify taking it into consideration in daily life. And it clearly isn't, or people wouldn't be debating this.

We'll have to wait for the actual paper to be published to see what the basis is, since TFA(s) contain nothing except flamebait. But research into this has been going on for a long time so which has come first? The definition of intelligence and the realization that men fit it best? Or the ever finer analysis of the differences between men and women and the definition of intelligence based on that? Surely the latter should be considered as a factor as by this stage in the game, no scientist designing these tests is entering the field without prior knowledge of these differences.

And does it make a difference to how you evaluate this post if you knew whether I was male or female? Because it shouldn't, but this report implies it should.

As you say, this paper is probably just flamebait, just because it will _sound_ scientific doesn't mean won't or can't be an attempt to draw some attention. I wish they had Slashdot moderation for scientific research publishings. This one might be a "-1 Troll".

This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.

The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.

Interestingly there is an accepted and known test for machine intelligence --the Turing test, but for humans it is not as clear. Is a tribesman from Africa less intelligent than me? He knows how to kill a lion, while I might know what a Hilbert space is, so who is more intelligent?

Until there is a concrete and accepted definition of human intelligence there can be no study about who is more intelligent than whom.

One might as well say that "men have been shown to be better at 'blah' then women, while women consistently outperform men at 'foo', and both are equally good at 'x'." Untill those 'blah', 'foo' and 'x' are defined the statement will make no sense.

Flamebait [wikipedia.org] or trollbait is a message posted to an Internet discussion group, such as a newsgroup or a mailing list, with the intent of provoking an angry response (a "flame").

Not everything that gets flamed is flamebait.

This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.

There are FEW people capable of seriously and objectively investigating it, but far fewer who are willing to listen to them.

The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.

FTFA:

There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees. At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.

I.Q. tests aren't perfect, far, far from it, I tend to say that they measure your ability to take an I.Q. test more than your intelligence, but it's something that can be measured, logged, and compared.

This study is interresting. It's not comforting, it's not in line with the current vogue of "everyone is the same" discourse, but that's no reason to NOT do the study, nor to refrain from publishing it.

If you want to debate the interpretation of the results, or the methodology, please, be my guest.But if you object to the study itself because it's subject is sensitive, by god, STFU&GBTW!

Extremist religion. No shit, that's a large part of where Muslim extremists are getting there support in the west--Muslim kids trying to piss off their moderate parents. Fanatacism is the new punk. But it'll pass...

If only there were some sexy chicks to say say gag one without the last bit, but I am afraid the situations a lot more grim that that. For one, no women will say that. And two, even if they did, it wouldn't be to anyone on slashdot.

gag three:

You know how there is a "womyn's room" in every uni? The idea being it's women without the "men". I want you to set up a "myn's" club in your local uni - our catchphrase will be "putting the myn back in womyn". Spread the meme.

</male crypto-fascist patriarchal bigotry></all that is funny and amusing>

You know how there is a "womyn's room" in every uni? The idea being it's women without the "men". I want you to set up a "myn's" club in your local uni - our catchphrase will be "putting the myn back in womyn". Spread the meme.

Oh, you mean you really *can't* read minds? Silly men. I guess we gals just take that ability for granted

At the risk of ruining the joke... there is something to this. Not the ability to literally read minds, but the ability to detect and interpret the subtle non-verbal cues people display that can provide information regarding their mental and emotional state -- for example, a repositioning of the posture of the shoulders, or a slight change in breathing pattern, a miniscule change in facial coloring, or even possibly a change in pheromone composition. I suspect that when women get frustrated with men for "just not knowing" things, it is because they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level, and therefore they take having that skill for granted and expect that everyone should be able to do it.

Many men, on the other hand, prefer explicit/formal communication and either dismiss these non-verbal cues as unimportant, or (just as likely) are unable to reliably detect them at all. This is especially the case among the borderline-Aspberger's-Syndrome types that like to frequent Slashdot (you all know who you are;^)), but I suspect it holds true on average for the gender as a whole.

Perhaps men tend to "go formalistic" and women tend to "just make-believe" but if so (and I don't believe it myself) then isn't that just a perfect example of "conveniently" removing a question rather than actually thinking about it?

"because they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level"

Sorry but I find this to be 100% total bullshit (just like the "news"), nobody understands nobody else instinctively - they just think they do. It's just a matter of having enough similar assumptions in the lower level inner workings of the indivduals thought: people who have similar interpreations of similar experiences tend to "instinctively" understand each other although they of course do nothing of the sort; they simply jump to the same conclusions in the same manners (and usually when they find they were wrong in those assumptions and "instinct" they fool themselves into believing otherwise).

This is exactly what happens in "male bonding" or any situation where you get to know a person close enough for long enough. Experience enough with said person and you will have enough "data" (common experiences) to "know" things (or at least think you do). Even with a very big amount of data (like living with someone for years and years) there will be the possibility of new "surprises" both because people change and because the generalisations one has based the interpretations on are just that: generalisations rather than constant reflection and dessication of though.

It is also the reason why people have a hard time understanding those with contrary opinions and tend to behave like sheep. To avoid this not only does one have to identify every presumption and assumption one makes and convey this clearly to explain ones own reasoning, but in addition the majority of opposing opinions involved have to do the same and everybody has to be willing to do it this way. Language (speech, written, body, or otherwise implied) and other "cues" is a seriously imprecise method of communication when these things are simply glossed over (for examples read any media reporting on anything from any perspective or see the ususal Slashdot flamefests on anything (or at least anything remotely political)).

The above does not neccessarily apply when people actually spend some time to actually think and reflect, but that is uncommon enough during public discourse in society as a whole to be valid in statistical generalisations (and such generalisations are usually worthless anyway - que the "news").

One of the primary reasons why this "real communication" is so rare should be obvious: it's very timeconsuming and most people aren't that interested in "whatever" even if it concerns a husband, wife, family, or friends - they just want to feel "ok" and in an environment where they don't have to bother too much while still feeling "appreciated" and "understood".

Anyway, when people don't "get" each other and are bewildered and confused they usually either get uncomfortable and shy away or blame it on whatever scapegoat is socially acceptable within their frame of reference i.e. "men are insensitive", "women are bitches", "Bush is Hitler", "commie liberals" or any other such mindless crap we all use intermittently.

All the above applies to me as well of course - I'm not that different.

And yet, despite this, it's been my experience that women in general are TERRIBLE at reading men's minds. If a man hasn't said something directly to them, they tend to be at least as clueless as men are supposed to be.

Now, this is all anecdotal, but it has been my experience. I would expect that it's the simple fact that most men and women expect the opposite sex to think the same way they do... which they kindof sortof do, but with generally different low-level priorities and therefore different results.

How often do you hear women talking about how their man won't share his feelings? I bet every one of his guy friends understands how he feels without him having to explain it in detail.

On a more serious note, it's worth pointing out that it's been known for some time that men have a wider range of IQ at both ends of the scale. Although men may, on average, be slighly brighter than women, at the top end of the scale men outnumber women 5-1, but that's also true at the bottom end of the scale. More of the really stupid people are male too.

Intelligence? Intelligent at what? An apache helicopter is pretty intelligent at dishing out bullets. Women are intelligent at reading minds. I think women are a lot more intelligent at social interactions, which are pretty complex tasks - computers suck at social interactions. Women also excel at spreading their attention, because, historically, they always had to keep an eye on a child, while doing everything else. Men excel at concentrating on single item tasks such as hunting and focusing on prey and nothing else for hours. Men also have the ability to gang, to undertake large-scope grand-scale single item task such as building something big or going to war, and these gangs function more by rule or code, than by fine and subtle sensing of each other's needs. Somebody says that we only use 10% of our brain capacity - I think it's more like 101% - and you can only get so much complexity out of a brain - those who have a very "high IQ" when it comes to science, technology, codes, rules, law, and abstract conceptual operations often find it very difficult to handle the simplest social interactions. The single item concentration plus spatial awareness means men might be on average better for science and technology, but still men can be real dummies at social things. Duh. You know, computers and automated machines will probably replace men at their single item roles first, because math/spatial/single item concentration things are easier to target and automate, and computers are tireless at concentrating their attention.
Men and women fulfill slightly different roles in humanity, if for nothing else, one gets to be pregnant, and breastfeed. There are interesting studies about women in jails - they form little families, and they constantly nest - they invent all kinds of little devices to decorate and make their environment functional, transform it into a "home." You know how you tell if a guy is not married? Go visit his apartment. Men in prison, on the other hand, they just gang up. Women in prison don't gang. When it comes to adapting to prison life, I'd say women are more intelligent.
Still, you have to watch these kinds or any kinds of of generalizations, because, did you know, that perhaps the smartest science "man" that ever lived was actually a woman? Equal opportunity given to everyone to flourish at what they love doing is the key, and just because averages say something, that doesn't mean anything. Even if a study says concludes something as arrogant as 99.999% women are dumber than 99.999% men, you never know which next female will be the one to outdo Newton, or which male will be the next "social genius" or "priest." I've seen all kinds of people, both social genius men, and excellent science genius women. You always have to keep an open mind when it comes to individuals, even if being aware of the group-statistics, so basically, group statistics go out the door when dealing with an individual at say a job interview, still, we don't need to hunt for something 'fishy' if only say 30% of certain 'male' jobs are filled by women, when their population distribution is 50/50%. Equal opportunity is the key, and letting everyone excel at what they are best at. If someone is a musician and not a phd physicist, that's at least as important a function - what's life worth without good music?

Based on reading the article, it isn't clear the women were given any incentives to do well on the test. No cookie, nothing. What I deduced was that women are smarter, and thus more likely to game the results, appearing a little less smart than they are.In a competitive social environment, there is a tactical advantage to being a little smarter than people think you are. Apparently women are a bit more in touch with this strategy. Run the study again, but tell them there's a $100 payoff for scores over 125, and watch the scores jump.I might be wrong, but it's testable.

Look, men are groomed from childhood to be smart, be athletic, make money, get a hot girlfriend or wife and work for a living their entire life.

Women are groomed to be cute, pretty and attract a rich, athletic, successful, smart man.

Women have as much potential as men. It's just a matter of where we, as a society, influence them to go. Girls are never praised for being so smart, but you're praised for being so cute and adorable the day you're born, then hot and sexy the rest of your life after some teen-ish age.

...I can only imagine how many women are going to protest this. On the same key, if there was a report that said women are smarter then men, most likely we would just accept it, or ignore it, and continue to put together the desk without directions.

That's probably true. IQ of a population, by design, graphs as a bell curve [wikipedia.org]. Graphed separately, the male curve is a little to the right and wider than the female, meaning males have more dunces and idiots.

Lynn and others have published on this before. I haven't read this paper, but "men are smarter" is probably still a gross oversimplification of the data.

In general male bell curves are wider than women's. Its true of height, weight, IQ, most diseases. It also appears to be true of others things such as the ability drive (most race car drivers are men and the people with the worst driving records are almost always men). Women tend to have much better language skills on average than men but the most of the best writers are male and in modern countries most of the few illiterate tend to be male as well.

It has to be something about instability of that Y chromosome. The X seems to be much more stable.

This is an interesting bit I've heard before. I don't know which curve has a higher mean, but the standard deviation for IQ among men is much higher than it is among women- there is a higher percentage of both idiots and geniuses among men than among women. It also happens that men's distribution curves have a higher standard deviation when measuring a whole lot of things- height, weight, metabolism, visual acuity, and many other things. It seems most likely that having the XY chromosome set results in a wider variance of expression than the XX chromosome set even for traits whose expression is primarily controlled by other genes.

It's easy to see why evolution would favor this outcome. Evolution favors any benefit that increases the probability of gene survival, which correlates with amount of reproduction. A woman who survives has a probability of attempting to reproduce (obtaining intercourse) of approximately 1. That is, nearly every woman who's capable of surviving is capable of getting a guy to have sex with her. Men, on the other hand, face a much more precarious situation. One highly successful male might copulate with many different women, while an unsuccessful male may never get the chance to reproduce at all.

Game theory tells us that, (ceteris paribus) lower chances of obtaining a goal, as well as exponential gains in the case of success, are both formulas that favor using a higher risk strategy. Thus, a higher standard deviation. Evolution is set up to favor greater genetic risk taking in males than in females.

Why exactly do we have to battle at all? What's the reason to have any sort of contest over which 'side' is 'better' than the other?
It just seems like a waste of energy to try and 'prove' that one sex is in any way superior to another. We are who we are, and most of our achievements aren't due to how our brains and bodies are wired at birth, it's what we do with our brains and bodies.

Is that nerds tend to be somewhat sexist. Not obnoxiously sexist, but sexist nonetheless. How many of us think that if everything else was equal that women would be equally recognized in IT, CS, etc? Maybe part of the problem is a certain level of sexual frustration on the part of the stereotypical nerd, but many of us are married, so what gives?

Now, paradoxically, this means something very strange. When a woman gets involved in a nerdy subject (like open source software) she often gets preferential treatment on the email lists. Why? because the nerds are all in awe that a woman is interested in this stuff. Unfortunately, I am not the only one to notice this.....

I will admit that I used to be much more sexist in this way than I am now. Now, because my free time is much more variable, I don't take as much time to care about whether the email was written by a man or a woman.....

When was it scientifically debunked (and by this I mean things not like "all men are supposed to be equal, so anything which says otherwise is clearly wrong" idiocy)? References, please.

Seriously, whenever some crackpot theory on genetic superiority or inferiority of men/women/Europeans/autistics/geeks/etc. is posted

This study in no way proves the genetic superiority or inferiority of either sex (even if the guy who did it himself thinks otherwise). Neither did his race/IQ study prove anything like that. I was hoping it would be clear by now...

This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.I have not read the article yet, but the last study I read that dealt with IQ (the controversial study on Ashkenazi genetic diseases and intelligence) cited some sources saying that IQ testing is the best known predictor for salary, family stability, and a whole bunch of other things.

Long version: I just about choked when I read the submitter's parting shot at IQ testing.

IQ testing is controversial. It is a test of normalization; "100" is always "average" because the scale is consistently normalized against the population. Higher-than-average IQ is one of the best predictors of a great many things--that's scientifically demonstrable. Many of those things are viewed as positive--again, this would be expected from a test based around checking averages.

Where people go wrong is when they notice trends in race (IIRC, blacks average one standard deviation lower than whites; asians average something like three points higher than whites) or gender (which was the subject of this study apparently). The trends themselves are hard to dispute, because the test is the same for everyone. But of course we all want to know why the trends pan out. We ask: Was the test biased to whites? Did the minorities come from low-income backgrounds? Is there some genetic link between intelligence and race or gender? Ad infinitum...

Of course everyone can see why these studies are considered offensive or inappropriate or just plain wrong. But the studies themselves are about the "why" and the "how"--and often these studies are inquiries so heavy-burdened with emotionally charged issues that even if they're handled properly, the findings will probably do more harm than good.

All of that said, this is a far cry from saying that IQ tests don't tell us "anything at all!" Like it or hate it, IQ tests are reasonably good predictors of one's potential precisely because they are normalized to function in precisely that way.

Taking your statements for granted, all you have shown is that there is a correlation between IQ score and some success metric. It doesn't demonstrate causality (esp. for a given individual) and doesn't justify a physical link between IQ and potential.All it says is people with high IQs do better by some chosen metric(s), in general, than people with low IQs - by design. The test itself may have value in that somehow it is measuring existing thought process. I cannot see how it measures potential (unless it

I hate how people get all pissed off and offended by "controversial" studies like this. If the study was done correctly, then there's really nothing you can do except shutup and live with it or do your own study that proves it wrong.

If the study was done correctly, then getting offended by the results is like getting offended when somebody says "The sky is blue." You just look like an idiot, no matter what gender you are.

The point is, when you have a scholarly paper (presumably there is a real scholarly paper behind this) you evaluate the paper on it's own merits. You read the research, the methods, the results and the conclusions. You then deicde what merit, if any it has. Maybe the methods are wrong, maybe the results don't substantiate the conclusions, maybe it's just plagarized Harry Potter text.

Whatever, the point is you judge the paper based on it's own merits. You do not read the brief conclusion in the abstract and start decrying it just because you don't like what it says. The truth is not always what you want ot hear and what you agree with, so just because you disagree doesn't make it wrong.

You yourself are guilty of this, you immediatly launched an ad homenim attack. You claim this guy is a proponent of Eugenics, and infer that therefore his paper is worthless. Further you use a straw man in saying that he favours shutting down ideas he disagrees with. Both of these presented with no proof.

Now frankly, I don't know if these are true, and I'm not going to take the time to research it, because I just don't care. The point is simple: IS the paper good research? I won't know until I've read it, so I'm certianly not going to start villifying it. Who cares who the author is? Science is not a popularity contest, it's not a democracy. It's a way of knowing about the universe. Thus you judge scientific research based on it's own merits, is the research sound or not.

Mi niece told me the other day that she would rather be beautifull than intelligent.
Society tells women to be stupid and popular and then asks itself why women, on average, seem less inteligent than men.

If your niece is still fairly young, tell her to turn off her TV. Throw out her Hollywood-preaching magazines. Tell her to grab a physics book, the works of Plato, or some other intellectual material for her to read and contemplate. Get her involved in sports. Teach her about camping and farming. Please, help your niece before it's too late.

Funny? Insightful! I wish your message would catch on universally - and for boys, too.

I just sent my little girl to kindergarten for the first time last week. I sat her down and had a heart-to-heart talk about what school would be like. I told her about how fun it's going to be to get better at reading, and learning math, and seeing the world of science, and I could see her eyes light up at the idea of the wonders in front of her.

I also told her that some people would tell her that girls can't learn or do as much as boys. I told her that those people are stupid and scared, and most importantly, wrong. She's lucky in that she has an automatic counterproof: my wife's a doctor, and graduated from Army Airborne school while in ROTC. My daughters and son know what women can do because their mommy showed them.

I also want the other little girls (and boys) to know that while there are differences between all of us, each individual can rise to the level they want. People who would tell them otherwise are murderers, as far as I'm concerned.

How many television shows have you seen depicting the man with lesser intelligence

The telling detail is that all the shows you listed as examples are comedies. Their purpose is to get the audience to laugh, and one way they do this is by presenting a situation that is the opposite of what the audience would expect: in this case, instead of the male being the competent leader, it's the female who is smart and makes him look bad, to humorous effect.

Try naming some "realistic drama" type shows where the female characters are the smarter/in-charge/competent characters. That would be more convincing.

Jump over to the Edge and read or download the PINKER VS. SPELKE [edge.org] debate. The points made by both parties lay a good foundation for looking at this issue.

A brief setup for the debate reads:"...on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes."

I would be willing to bet that if a woman were to come up with an IQ test that women would do better at it than men.

Being smart doesn't make you better at anything other than being smart. If you can add two 8 digit numbers in your head then great. If you can lift a car over your head, good for you. If you can stomach the sight of blood enough to become a doctor, guess what... good for you.

Women, men, children, black, white, grey, whatever.... who you are is not defined by what you can do better than others. Nobody is the best at everything. Some people throw great parties or know how to make others laugh and feel better about themselves. If that is their greatest skill then so be it. Everyone should be happy with themselves or at least be given sufficient opportunity to be happy with themselves.

If your only way to be happy about yourself is to be better at something than others, find a new hobby.

A: "Intelligence is what IQ Tests Measure."(Yeah, I know it's not actually funny)

Basically, the psychologists make this construct they term intelligence quotient, and they try to make a test that will measure the construct. If they can get reliability across a number of tests, plus a few more things, then you have a number that you can attribute to "Intelligence," which is really handy if you want to make a test that determines if men or women have more of this "Intelligence".

That's pretty much it. Oh, okay, that's not all, but in effect, you see if anything else correlates with Intelligence, and if so, then you'll be relatively safe in betting that, whatever positively correlates with it, means that other correlations will similarly relate. So if people who are more intelligent are more likely to get a particular neurodegenerative disease, and men have more intelligence than women, then chances are, more men will have this disease than women.

However, presuming that Intelligence means anything other than what it correlates with in tests is foolish. It's not necessarily a predictor of success, it's not necessarily a predictor of the ability to solve problems other than the ones covered in the IQ tests, and it's not necessarily a predictor that you're a better person. It just means that you have a higher amount of the traits covered by this particular construct.

What I find intresting is the replies from the "men of the street" shown in the BBC's article.

One women was openly offended. Almost all of then seemed to be offended. Not a single women accepted the study.

Some men belived the study and were delited about its results. Most of the men didn't belive the study.

Some replies didn't belive the study because of their "personal experience". Few women belive insomekind of conspiracy. One male doesn't seem to belive it science. Also few men point out the fact that men tend to have higher variance in IQ tests. They seem to suspect that the results were in fact measuring this.

Not a single person considered to read the study before commenting on it. Not even Maria from Sheffield who was "suprised that a academic journal is even considering this publication".

I think that this Maria is not alone and we hear lots of similar comments. And they are listened. Welcome to an age where academic journals screen articles based on the results not the methodology.

When my mom asks what I did today at work, and I say that I developed some mixin classes in Java because it does not support multiple inheritance unlike other object oriented frameworks and used generics because I want my compiler to catch some casting errors at compile-time rather than run-time because the application runs in a networked environment lossy at the transport layer and where distributed debugging is hard although Apache log4j helps and it's the best I can do because my boss wouldn't allow me to use Python which is dynamically typed and shares the same garbage collection facilities as Java which I think is of the generational variety although I haven't disassembled to find out and has wonderful functional programming elemets built in like anonymous methods and the Mersenne Twister random number generator built right-in that has a 623-dimensionally equidistributed uniform distribution... She starts complaining about headaches and how she doesn't get it.

Then I ask my dad if he wants more elaboration, but he just shakes his head and turns away, because he OBVIOUSLY gets it.

I thought about why measuring intelligence is so taboo. It seems that it's one of the few things that scientists are not allowed to study, not because it violates the law, but because it's simply taboo. It seems that as soon as we are able to devise methods of measuring intelligence, such measurements also became taboo or at best are viewed as curiosities flaunted by the arrogant.

Perhaps that's because correlating these measurements with any kind of social categorization, whether it be race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, eye color, etc ignites a socially unacceptable controversy. If these correlations are taken seriously, it often leads to attempts at eugenics and strengthens discrimination against the group that is deemed "less intelligent". These correlations are not false in that they violate generally accepted statistical practices, it's just that we feel that we're better off not knowing and entertaining the illusion that all are roughly equal.

If our modern atheist society has a religion which facilitates social cohesion than this is probably part of it: That we're all of equal ability and if we just work at it anyone has the same chance of acheiving a goal as anyone else. Intelligence correlations contradict this idea directly and are therefore considered heresy and hence are taboo.

Are men on the average physically stronger than women? Of course, no (sane) person would argue that this is sexist to say. Can men have babies? No. Clearly there are physical difference between the sexes. So why should it surprise anyone that our brains are wired differently as well?

That said, 'intelligence' is extremely tricky to define, composed of dozens of different dimensions. It's possible that women do better at certain areas than men, and vice versa.

This also is an average. It doesn't mean that every woman is inferior to every man, as some people will assume this means.

This is the same guy who published a book [wikipedia.org] which claimed that differences in GDP were explainable in terms of the differences in mean IQ between countries, using data that claimed that the average IQ in Equatorial Guinea was 59.

While I'm sure the average Equatorial Guinean is poorly educated and might well have received insufficient iodine as a child, that figure is so insanely low (more than 2.7 standard deviations below the global mean of 100) as to fail the laugh test.

Because a charlatan like Richard Lynn told you so? Have you ever even been to Africa?
Some eugenicist quack without any knowledge of a single African language invents numbers out of whole cloth through "geographical averaging" [sic], chooses to ignore or downplay the Flynn Effect as it suits him, compares incomparable datasets separated by decades, uses tiny samples to stand in for entire countries, and just because the results match the racial prejudices of morons like you, it's simply eaten up uncritically.
Unlike you, I've actually spent lots of time in Africa, and I know for a fact that the average person I've met in my time there was no less intelligent than the average European or white American, especially when spoken to in his or her own language. Your crap about "pure" blacks and "interbreeding" (as if people of different colors were different species) only says just how far gone you are in Nazi thinking.

I don't comment much on Slashdot.org. I mostly read and analyze the information provided. I check out comments from time to time. Being a female, I do feel inclined to comment on this post.

I simply do not regard this gentleman's research to have any bearing on me or the makeup of my mind. I am not insipid or stupid. I am sure I am ignorant of subjects that hold little interest for me just like many others, male or female.

If some men want to be brash and make a cockup of things in the world, let them dine on cheese and wine. I have more fruitful endeavors to pursue such as my own education, my contributions to society as a worker, educator, and a mother to my future children.

Though some men would like to dimiss us, women have played significant roles in the development of men. That is no small feat. Raising children is a critical process of life and a daunting one.

Women have a great capacity to contribute to the world just like men. We have in fact contributed many things in various fields.

Society plays a huge role in grooming people. Of course, there is a certain amount of free will, but conditioning is a powerful thing. As a woman, when I look at magazines, television, etc, women are not treated the same as men. Women are provided with superficial imagery and the conditioning it imposes, which is to be beautiful, be thin, be popular, date (i.e. date good looking or someone with money) guys, get married and have children.

Things are not not as rigid like they were in the past. However, the importance of looks and stereotypical female roles of the past are still blindly emphasized and are jejune.

Stereotypes are one of the biggest issues facing everyone and women. However, there is also the ingracious facet of human behavior of survival of by any means necessary, and if this means, subverting a group within the human race to make sure another is on top, it will happen. It seems one of the faults of our design.

It could have always worked the other way around with women on top and men on bottom. Unfortunately, women, as a collective majority, not speaking individually, have begrudgely faced this assimiliation into a stereotypical, conditioned servitude for some time now.

When we do speak up, we are often dismissed, belittled, or made fun of. I really wish that the men out there who feel inclined to inflict pain upon us, put us down, etc could really understand how much they are undermining society due to a selfish, egotistic, ingrating need to be top dog.

behaving as though the difference was much greater than it actually is

assuming that women are only the victims and never the perpetrators

This scientific study shows there is a difference between the average man and average woman. It says nothing of any two given individuals.

A difference of 5 points is small. It is so small that I have no doubts that one's messured IQ would vary by more than that from day to day. Which leads me to ask why there is no margin of error included in the numbers. I would be most interested to see how they arrived at their numbers.

But, I would not say that the researcher or research is biased. With the current state of science, I would not be surprised to find that the methodology was suspect or that the outcome incorrect due solely to poor work.

You state:

Society plays a huge role in grooming people. Of course, there is a certain amount of free will, but conditioning is a powerful thing. As a woman, when I look at magazines, television, etc, women are not treated the same as men. Women are provided with superficial imagery and the conditioning it imposes, which is to be beautiful, be thin, be popular, date (i.e. date good looking or someone with money) guys, get married and have children.

A good portion of the greeting card industry thrives on portaying men in the worst terms. Try a little experiment: Go to a card shop and pick out some of the "humorous" ones involving men and women and reverse the sexes and ask yourself "Would this card be sold like that?"

In many instances, if a man is accused of a crime, especially a sex crime, the man is automatically considered, and treated, as guilty. In a He said/She said situation, what She said is considered truth. Also, as we have seen recently in my home state of Florida, if a woman has sex with a young teen she is considered "sick" and in need of help, not inprisonment. If a man were to do the same, there would be calls for life sentences, castration, and execution. She is "mentally ill and in need of care" and he is a monster deserving of the worst punishments imaginable.

Many women's groups lie. My favorite is the statement that spouse abuse complaints and emergency room visits jump drastically on Superbowl Sunday in the US. This has been proven false. It was made up on the spot during a press conference.

Women are just as shallow as men, but do not own up to it. And, often they are even more mercenary.

Perhaps you are just blind to anything that does not directly effect you.

Regarding the argument of some that it is reasonable for women to be hostile to this, due to past injustices...Past injustices don't justify a paranoid, unintellectual reaction to studies. Either this is true, or it isn't.

I'd also note that many of the things you describe as "rights", aren't or shouldn't be. "The right to vote" is newspeak for "the 'right' to aggress against others" (namely, to openly express and act upon one's desire to take that which they haven't earned). Regarding discrimination in the workplace, no-one has the "right" to work at a specific company. I'd argue, however, that there are alot of managers who would like nothing more than to have all female employees. Furthermore, to the extent that women are discriminated against* in the workplace, this creates a profit opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to hire them at lower wages.

On a related argument, a professor of mine gave a very interesting lecture, for which I have notes [mises.org], discussing the wage-gap between men and women and the glass ceiling. He argues that the "wage gap" (women receiving 70% the pay of men) is really nothing more than the result of the fact that women (not men) get pregnant, and tend to thus take time off and stay at home to be parents. When you look at never-married men vs. never-married women, and teenaged boys vs. teenaged girls, there is no statistically significant wage-gap.

As regards the glass-ceiling, he argues this is due to a difference in the dispersions of IQ among men and women. He argues that although the average IQ of men and women may be the same, the distribution for women is more concentrated on the mean, while the distribution for men is less concentrated on the mean (fatter tails). That is, there are fewer very dumb or very smart women, and more very dumb or very smart men. Likewise with regards to other social characteristics, such as aggression. If you look at the highest peaks of many areas -- chess, business, science, etc -- they are dominated by men; however, you also see prisons and insane-asylums overwhelmingly occupied by men.

The reason for this is that men are expendable, and women are not. If 99% of the female population dies out, the human race is in severe trouble; if 99% of the male population dies out, the remaining 1% (provided adequate fecundity and stamina) can relatively quickly repopulate.

Interestingly, someone else brought up the issue of "emotional quotient" or "EQ". From their description of it, it seems to measure maturity, the ability to sacrafice immediate gratification for more long-term gratification. As emotional intelligence is "an awareness of and ability to manage emotions and create motivation", this would seem to be an appropriate characterization of part of the issue. Economists -- particularly those of the Austrian school -- call this "time-preference". Lower time-preferences are civilizing forces, and lead to success. Criminals and children, for example, are characterized by high time-preference (a rapist is someone who simply can't wait; children will give up $1000 tomorrow for $1 today; etc). I don't see why this doesn't fall under the rubric of general "intelligence".

* The term "discriminate" here is used in the very narrow sense, in that being female is considered as a negative aspect, all else equal. In reality, all private property, and every choice of free people, is based on discrimination.

Without having read the article, this does sound quite a bit like earlier findings that men have more grey matter and women more 'white' matter. That is, men are better at pure processing and women are better at making connections between things. This is consistent with conventional wisdom (like "Men navigate by names and numbers, women navigate by landmarks"), and is hardly what I would call controversial. In addition, saying that women 'use' their grey matter more effectively by making connections better doesn't imply that increases in grey matter are useless; your implied assertion that IQ is 'useless' it unfounded. There are many areas (mathematics, science) where focussed processing power (if you'll allow the analogy) is exceedingly useful.

Depending on my mood, I find it annoying or amusing that people would be up in arms for saying that men are more intelligent, but nobody thinks twice when someone says that women are more intuitive. If these recent studies and conventional wisdom are to be believed, then both statements are equally correct.

Men- men orgasm before sex is complete (woman need to do it before the man... or no chance).- men make women cook... woman just do it- men encourage woman to shave sensitive areas... we refuse.

Woman- hold men hostage by their penis- can be a bitch a few days a month, and blame it on biologicial processes (and blame men somehow)- scream for equal rights... except when the draft comes around... then "gender roles are essential in society".- can orgasm in the shower without getting a cramp from stroking (damn waterpik's).

The real point is what if they reported that women were found to be more intellegent? Would there be the same hesitation to report the findings? I've heard other reports that claimed women were superior with some subjects and those were thought to be reporting accurately but when the opposite is found to be true it's a vicious lie. Have we hit the point that the facts must fit into political correct position? I guess the answer is obvious but the real victim in the end may be science and the truth. What if you take it to the next level and said it's wrong to report that some races and sexes were more prone to some deseases? We're close to that and I've heard complaints about those findings as being potentially racist. Burying those facts could cost lives all in the name of sparing some one's feelings.

I realize this is/. humor, but some might be interested in a 50-year longitudinal study called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth [vanderbilt.edu] (SMPY), hosted currently by Vanderbilt U. It is the longest-term study of its kind, designed to track boys and girs through a 50-year period, and is now in its third decade. The study has spawned over 300 research articles, and is considered by many to be the best collection of data in existence concerning intelligence differences betweens males and females.

Of course, I might be biased since I was a participant in one of the first cohorts, but it's certainly worth a look if you're interested in this kind of thing.

This simply begs the question of what use IQ tests are if they don't predict anything in the real world.

No, it doesn't. That's not what begging the question means. Perhaps it raises that question. Begging the question is assuming the wanted conclusion.

So, for instance, if the professor said, "IQ tests measure immutable intelligence. Women do less well on IQ tests. Therefore, women are less intelligent," when it's not precisely known if there is a single thing measurable as intelligence (as opposed to a number of factors which tend to correlate, but don't lend themselves to organizing humans on a Great Chain of Being, white boys up near the top and black folks down near the bottom.)

Remember, Steven Jay Gould said that there are four factors that are necessary for this interpretation of intelligence: it must be reliably measurable. It must be a single linearly-rankable quality. It must be heritable (well, for the race-based portion of this trope). And it must be immutable. Drop any of those four (three for the sex-based portion) and the whole argument collapses.

All that his data shows is a correlation between sex (or, elsewhere, race) and what is measured by IQ tests. (Did You Know that the Alfred Binet, inventor of IQ tests, was strongly opposed to any interpretation of IQ as a real thing instead of just an average, or of its being considered immutable? Yeah, he's been doing a slow rotisserie in his grave since Yerkes and Goddard brought his work to America.)

From the same guy [fair.org]:
What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the 'phasing out' of such peoples.... Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality....
Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?
Slashdot posting stories from leading racists? Awsome.

Actually, I'm rather surprised to see this IQ malarkey coming up again and again. The best rebuttal I've read was the late Professor Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. The "standard" IQ test is anything but standard, and the notion of reducing human intelligence to any single metric is pure hogwash. With my historical bent, I fond the most interesting part of the book to be the copious details about the history of IQ testing, which was basically created to facilitate the sorting of American draftees for WW I. What the tests actually measure is a kind of similarity metric between the testees and the authors' of the test.

There is so much confusion about the notions of intelligence, cleverness, wisdom, creativity, etc., etc. that belief in the signficance of IQ testing only proves someone to be an elitist fool--usually because that person "does well" on certain tests.

By the way, I almost always score in the top 1% on every standardized written test, including IQ tests. The only exception I can recall was the LSAT, where I only scored in the top 10%. However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.

Your post is an example of how ideology and dogma can confuse the issue.

I base this on a couple of things you wrote.

What a clear example of the harm of using non-scholarly sourcing (for the record, I love Wikipedia for getting a general idea of a topic, but I would never use it as an authoritative source on a complicated topic such as this one).

Even worse than these flaws, though, is your conclusion that "there may be some truth to it."

The only reason you might consider this harmful is if you already believe what the source suggests is false. It's unlikely that you would claim that that there was much harm in believing a non-scholarly source if what that source was claiming what you believed already to be true.

I also said that there may be something to it. And there might. There is no evidence that you've given that rules it out. If anything, you're the one implying the much stronger claim that there is no relationship.

How can you make such a strong claim? The only thing that might engender that level of confidence in you without strong evidence is ideological, not scientific, thinking.

If you think you've got evidence that rules out a connection between race and intelligence then let's have it. Until then you can keep your sense of moral superiority to yourself. I'm not interested in what you think should be true or comforting.

Seems to me the Emotional Quotient is a simple reaction to IQ. "So, men perform better in one test, let's find another evaluation that is broadly similar in name, mixes concepts and in which woman get the best results".

Nobody complains that women and asian people are smaller on average then men and african people, but when it comes to IQ, seems every group on average should get the same average (men, women, caucasian, black, rich, poor, Britney Spears fans, music lovers, and so on). Absurd.

Why should these quotient measurements give equal score to all sides? Why would nature divide intelligence equally between gender and races?

Success in the real world is defined by one's ability to use logic to regulate emotions so that they do not become dominant. That's your EQ (what I think it should be). If emotion controls logic, you're probably entangled so far into your ideals that you'd contradict their very meaning in the process. i.e. being so anti-fascist that you become fascist.

IQ is a load of bunk. So is EQ. The whole notion of what we call human intelligence can be described in one, two or even 10 simple, easily quantified parameters is stupid and unscientific.

The idea that emotion and intelligence (or: Sense and Sensibility) are two distinct things is antique philosophical claptrap, with little justification in reality.

Results in neurology (a real science, as opposed to most psychology) indicate that not only are these things nondistinct, but rather that human emotions provide the foundation for what we call 'intelligence', even of the abstract kind.Read, for instance Descartes' Error [amazon.com], by Antonio Damasio.

While IQ is theoretically justified, EQ is just a bunch of big crap for people to believe in and to make some BIG bucks:

EQ "tests" were validated with samples that are NOT available to scientific scrutiny. The samples are property of a company (forgot the name), and are not being released on basis of intellectual property. All of you people, who read that EQ tests are valid and read the validation scores - must take them as they are - you will not be able to check them personally.

Sorry, this is relevant in the context of this person claiming to have been denied the vote, how?

Unless she is over 100 years old or so, she's full of shit. She hasn't been denied a damn thing; in fact, if she's under 30 or so, chances are she's gotten more opportunity than most males due to female-specific scholarships and affirmative action.

Maybe it's because it took YEARS for us to have the same "rights" as men. Maybe it's because we've been treated as the lesser of two human beings for centuries.

I am so tired of hearing that. It didn't take YOU years to get anything. YOU haven't been treated as ANYTHING for centuries. I am willing to bet you haven't been alive for a third of a century, let alone a full century. Last I checked, you had a bunch of rights, as well as laws and government agencencies to protect those rights.

I'm not sparking a debate here, but you guys need to think for a second. You haven't been denied the right to vote, discriminated at the workplace, took lesser wages, get constanly objectified... all because you're a chick.

No, but I have been denied due process, discrimated against at work, been DENIED positions, been objectified as a source of income and security, been judged on my appearance... All because I am an intellegent overweight white male who generally makes good money.

Maybe it's because we've been treated as the lesser of two human beings for centuries.

At least in the european societies, that just isn't true for at least 2000 years.

If a ship sunk, who got to the lifeboats? "women and children first"

During the centuries, women were treated differently as men - that's true - however they weren't ever treated as "a lesser human", quite to the contrary, a women's life was regarded to be worthy a lot more than the life of a man.

Actually if you look at suicide rates, it seems that women were never as unhappy as today.

Booyakasha. E-man indahouse aiii. Big shout out ta mi Slashdottas massiv wit a capital S, coz slashdot iz a place izznit - u see I aint no ignoramus. Things like 'apple' and 'orange' do not start wit a capital letter, unless dey iz at de start of a sentence - but some of you brainboxes probably already know dat already innit. Me name be Albert E and me represent de USA. For those of u who didn't study geography de USA is a place over a 100 MILES wide, de capital of it iz? Anyone? Not u geography squar